2. Division of Labour and Machinery
Marx continues to expose Proudhon's petty-bourgeois, moral dualism approach to history, by examining Proudhon's account, whereby the division of labour is the starting point. As its “good” side, Proudhon says,
““Considered in its essence, the division of labour is the manner in which equality of conditions and intelligence is realized.”
(Tome I, p. 93.)” (p 118)
Marx notes that Proudhon gives two alternative “bad” sides. Firstly,
““The division of labour has become for us an instrument of poverty.”
(Tome I, p. 94.)” (p 118)
And, secondly,
““Labour, by dividing itself according to the law which is peculiar to it, and which is the primary condition of its fruitfulness, ends in the negation of its aims and destroys itself.”
(Tome I, p. 94.)” (p 118)
The problem to be solved, therefore, by some antidote, is
“To find the “recomposition which wipes out the drawbacks of the division, while retaining its useful effects."
(Tome I, p. 97.)” ( p 118)
According to Proudhon, the division of labour is an eternal natural law. The bourgeois economists, he claims, either did not recognise its “bad” side, or else believed it was outweighed by its “good” side. If the division of labour is, indeed, an abstract, eternal law, then simply this idea is sufficient to explain its manifestation in different modes of production, and the consequent division of society into different strata, the existence of corporations, manufacture, and large-scale industry all flow from the concept of division. On this basis, there is no need to analyse the specific nature of the division of labour in different modes of production.
“Certainly, things would be made much too easy if they were reduced to M. Proudhon’s categories. History does not proceed so categorically. It took three whole centuries in Germany to establish the first big division of labour, the separation of the towns from the country. In proportion, as this one relation of town and country was modified, the whole of society was modified. To take only this one aspect of the division of labour, you have the old republics, and you have Christian feudalism; you have old England with its barons and you have modern England with its cotton lords.” (p 119)
As Marx sets out, in Capital I, there was division of labour in the primitive commune, as well as in the individual peasant household, under feudalism. It is a consequence of The Law of Value, which, as Marx sets out in his Letter to Kugelman, does operate as a natural law. It drives the need to raise productivity, one means of which is the division of labour, but the more powerful means being the development of technology. It is the latter, not the division of labour, that drives the evolution of productive and social relations, and, it is these changes in society that, then, determines the different forms in which the division of labour is manifest, just as it is these social changes that determine the different forms of labour, means of production, distribution and so on.
“In the 14th and 15th centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America did not yet exist for Europe, when Asia existed only through the intermediary of Constantinople, when the Mediterranean was the centre of commercial activity, the division of labour had a very different form, a very different aspect from that of the 17th century, when the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French had colonies established in all parts of the world. The extent of the market, its physiognomy, give to the division of labour at different periods a physiognomy, a character, which it would be difficult to deduce from the single word divide, from the idea, from the category.” (p 119)
What was it that drove that change? It is that, from the fifteenth century, an expansion of commodity production and exchange occurs rapidly in the towns, as the towns themselves grow as centres of commerce. It creates the size of market that makes industrial production on a capitalist basis, in these towns, possible. The bourgeoisie expands quickly, first as a commercial bourgeoisie, and that drives the search for new markets, new sources of commodities, and, thereby, the voyages of discovery, and establishment of colonies. The expansion of markets is what drove an increased social division of labour.
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